by Tim Mason
A dissenting murmur from his companion: “No, no . . .”
“Owen, there are those in this realm who detest me, this is not a matter for debate. I am the foreigner, the German who stole their princess from them. I am the introducer of strange un-English ideas.”
“Your Great Exhibition changed all that, sir,” said Owen.
“Ten years later, does anyone care? Oh! how the great men opposed me and my exhibition! It was all a conspiracy to give away the secrets of British industry to the world! Because, of course, no one knows anything but the British, and the British have nothing to learn from anyone, ever!”
The Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851 had been condemned from the pulpit. Members of Parliament had proclaimed their hope that it would fail. The aristocracy in particular had been skeptical; many of them, in fact, did loathe the German prince. He was stiff in society; his demeanor revealed the contempt he had for it. As it happened, the international display of technological advances had been a stunning success with the general public and with visitors from around the world. Millions had attended, the exhibition more than paid for itself, and in 1854 the entire massive glass structure was disassembled and moved from Hyde Park to Sydenham, south of the Thames.
“I understand, Sir Richard, that your monstrous lizards still inspire fear amongst the matrons of Surrey.”
Owen raised his eyebrows and smiled modestly. “Indeed,” he said. “There is even talk of erecting a similar menagerie in the Central Park of New York.”
It was Owen who had coined the word dinosaur and who was the first to classify the gigantic fossil remains of the “terrible lizards,” which were being discovered throughout the world. Both respected for his brilliance and feared for his competitive malice, Owen had a high forehead, a prominent narrow nose, thin lips, and a wife and son whom he rarely saw. Critics said that Owen had never acknowledged his debt to Gideon Mantell, a self-taught scholar from the lower classes whose earlier work with fossils had paved Owen’s way. It was common knowledge that Owen had viciously fought the presentation of the Royal Society’s medal to Mantell for his pioneering work. The man had been cruelly disfigured by disease, then a carriage accident, and lived in constant pain; many were appalled when, following Mantell’s death, Owen had the man’s misshapen skeleton publicly displayed at the Royal College of Surgeons.
What mattered to the Prince, though, was that Owen had been a staunch supporter of his exhibition. Under Owen’s direction, a sculptor had created massive full-scale models of a number of dinosaurs. At the exhibition’s opening festivities, he had hosted a party entirely inside one of these models, a dinner for twenty-one guests—including Albert.
“If something should happen to the Queen,” said Albert, abruptly, “what would become of the nation? Could Bertie govern?”
At last we come to it! The shooting today has put him in mind of mortality and royal succession.
Owen had tutored the royal children when they were younger, and he considered the eldest boy, Albert, Prince of Wales and heir to the throne, to be dull, indolent, and vain. “With proper guidance, I believe he could, sir,” he said.
“With guidance from whom, Owen? From you? Let us assume for the moment that both the Queen and I were absent from the scene.”
“No, no, no . . .”
“One must have clarity, Sir Richard, and courage. Could our eldest son assume the throne and acquit himself honorably?”
Owen was silent and the Prince nodded grimly. “So, this is our dilemma. I plan to take the Queen to Coburg in September to visit my homeland. Must we take Bertie with us, to keep him in line?”
“I am sure it would be instructive for him.”
“Perhaps we will send him to America. He’s been invited often enough. He would need a chaperone, of course, and Bishop Wilberforce, alas, has risen too high in the world to be of service. We had a letter from him this afternoon, quite upset over the events of the morning.”
“Of course, sir. So were we all.”
“Wilberforce, too, expresses interest in the Prince of Wales.” Albert gazed thoughtfully at Owen. “The bishop is going ahead with this debate at Oxford, or perhaps you were already aware of this.”
“Indeed.”
“Will Mr. Darwin participate?”
“It is uncertain,” said Owen. “There is the matter of his health, you know.”
“In any case Wilberforce will be going up against Huxley, God help him.”
“The bishop of Oxford is quite a capable debater, sir. I shouldn’t worry about him.”
Albert snorted. “Worry about Soapy Sam? I certainly shall not!”
Owen stiffened. “I myself will be coaching the bishop for this debate in matters of comparative anatomy.”
“Will you indeed, Owen! What is it you people have against Darwin?”
“I, sir? I have known Charles Darwin for twenty years. I believe I may say, in all modesty, that he looks up to me as a guiding light. I have nothing against the man.”
“Do you not? You people came down rather hard on us when the Queen wished to bestow a knighthood on him.”
“That, sir, was Bishop Wilberforce, not I. I believe Darwin to be a scholar and a gentleman who has simply drawn seriously mistaken conclusions from his rather admirable researches. Bishop Wilberforce is obliged, of course, by his vocation to object to the man’s conclusions.”
“Nothing to do with his vocation, I should have thought. Matter of science. Facts and figures, not religion.”
“In this, sir, I am afraid we disagree. The lines between the two may seem to be parallel, but ultimately there is one line that intersects all others.”
“Wouldn’t think the Lord God Almighty needed Sam Wilberforce defending him, but then, he’s got pluck. Wilberforce, I mean.” The storm had lessened and the Prince turned again to the windows, looking out. “I intend to put Darwin’s name forward once more, in the next Honors List. I mean to say, Her Majesty intends to do so.”
“Indeed?”
“Indeed,” repeated the Prince with the barest hint of an edge. “I am told he may be the greatest man of science these islands have produced since Newton.”
“May I ask, sir,” said Owen with an edge of his own, “who has compared Charles Darwin to Sir Isaac Newton?”
“You are not the only respected natural historian who dines with us, Sir Richard.” He turned to Owen and added, “But you are one of the most esteemed.” Owen acknowledged both the rebuke and the compliment with a slight bow.
“I’ve kept you late again, haven’t I. But now you see the rain is stopping and you will have a better journey home.” Albert pulled a hidden lever, and a butler appeared instantly. “Have Sir Richard’s carriage brought round.” The man inclined his head and vanished.
“Do you know,” said the Prince, stepping out into the hall, “we interviewed that detective fellow today, the real Mr. Bucket.”
“Indeed?”
“Detective Inspector Charles Field. I can see how Dickens might have become interested in the man—he is larger than life somehow. Even in person, the man seems like fiction.” Albert moved crisply down the passage while Sir Richard hurried alongside. “Field thinks today’s attempt upon the life of the Queen was not the work of a lone madman but part of a conspiracy.”
“Does he now?”
“It seems there was a murder committed that is somehow connected.” Albert stopped at the head of a grand staircase. “Here, my friend, is where we part company.”
Owen seemed suddenly at a loss. “Ah, yes. A conspiracy, you say?”
“I do enjoy our little talks,” said Albert, oblivious. Even before Owen could bow, the Prince Consort was walking away, his upright form receding down a long, flickering hall of gilt and glass. A footman nearby coughed gently. Sir Richard Owen turned and followed him down the steps.
It was well past midnight. The rain had stopped and a wind had risen. The temperature was dropping and a half-moon was alternately revealed and hidden by r
agged, fast-moving clouds.
The Royal College of Surgeons at Lincoln’s Inn Fields was mostly dark at this time of night but far from empty. Row after row of mounted skeletons stared mutely at each other across the ages. Fetuses floated in countless glass vessels. In the cool vaults below, corpses lay waiting to offer up their secrets to the keen blades of the students and faculty.
The tall young man—a living specimen, known from childhood as “the Chorister”—glided up the staircase to the ground level. The night porter had given him the message that the professor had arrived and wished to see him, so Decimus Cobb had put down his instruments and made himself ready for the interview.
Tonight, the Chorister knew his mentor would speak of the day’s failure, and he knew he would be scolded for it, but what was he to do? His master was determined to keep himself and his cohorts far removed from the work they had assigned him, so he had been compelled to recruit a deniable agent: the lunatic Rendell who, it transpired, could not shoot straight. If only they would give Decimus free rein! He wasn’t worried. The professor would chide him but not overmuch: the older man feared his protégé greatly, and with good reason. (It was Decimus, in fact, who had boiled and boned the paleontologist Gideon Mantell and mounted his twisted spine for public view years earlier, when the anatomy student was barely out of his teens.)
The Chorister’s dark deep-set eyes burned with fervor. He would deal with the butcher’s boy who had spotted him tomorrow, one way or another. And Philip David Rendell, recently of Islington and currently residing in Newgate Prison—he would find a way of dealing with him as well. All that could wait until morning.
Lamplight through frosted glass splayed across the floor before him. Decimus paused. As always, the ambient odor of formaldehyde comforted him. He turned the brass knob on the door marked hunterian professor, royal college of surgeons and saw Sir Richard Owen, still wearing a damp raincoat, rise from behind his desk, a mixture of anger and fear contorting his face. Decimus smiled serenely and bowed. Then he froze.
Someone else was there. An old gentleman, florid face, bushy white hair and beard, head like a lion’s, fierce and unforgiving.
Betrayed!
The Chorister’s eyes flew back to Owen.
“Decimus,” said Owen maliciously, “allow me to introduce Sir Jasper Arpington-Dix. He’s the one actually running this show.”
The Chorister was mute, his smile gone, a red heat filling his head.
“I’m not afraid of you, young man,” said Sir Jasper. “I’ve dealt with worse than you, believe me. You’re a means to an end, that’s all.”
Decimus Cobb went to the quiet place in his mind, a place where he could visualize the dissection of the man standing before him.
“None of that!” said Sir Jasper, as though he’d been listening to the Chorister’s thoughts. “Sit!”
Decimus sat.
Sir Jasper limped around the desk, leaning heavily on his stick, until he stood directly over Decimus. “You’ve damn near given away the game, you know.”
“Conspiracy!” said Owen. “I heard the word from the Prince’s own lips!”
“Did you really find it necessary to cut your man’s throat then and there, Mr. Cobb, moments after Inspector Field interviewed him? My house is close by, you see. I was watching. I found it curious. And so did Detective Inspector Field!”
Decimus considered the various implements he had secreted within his clothing. Some were spring-mounted; all of them were razor sharp. It had been years since anyone had dared to confront him like this. But the white-haired old lion was different; he actually wasn’t frightened.
“I only employ effective tools,” continued Sir Jasper. “Those who are not, I discard. Are you an effective tool, Mr. Cobb? Will you be?”
The Chorister found himself nodding. “Yes, sir,” he said in a quiet voice.
“Do you give your word?”
And even as Decimus mentally sorted through the organs in the old man’s body, he nodded again like a child and said, “Yes, sir. I give my word, sir.”
“Good. Today was a setback, nothing more. We have just tonight received intelligence concerning the royal family’s plans, and we foresee an opportunity arising in the autumn. Owen here tells me you traveled in Prussia when you were a young man.”
Decimus’ eyes rose to Owen’s for one red instant and then fell again.
“Well,” continued Sir Jasper, “you have from now until September to acquaint yourself with a particular locale in that region. I’ll help you. Come—not so downcast, young man. This is good news—we’re going to employ your considerable skills much more directly. Go now. Leave us. You’ll hear from me.”
Decimus rose as steadily as he could. He bowed to the two men and left.
Sir Jasper Worthing Reynolds Arpington-Dix, riding home in a hackney coach, breathed deeply of the rain-freshened air. At age seventy, Sir Jasper was the latest scion of a family that had achieved prominence and great wealth two centuries earlier with the rise of the East India Company. Now all that and much more, according to Sir Jasper, was threatened.
Where had it all begun, this frightening decline? A dozen years earlier, in the late 1840s, Europe had been convulsed by revolution. Suddenly there was wave after wave of political uprisings—in the German states, in France and Italy. Sir Jasper, then in his late fifties, had worked at fever pitch to maintain the family fortunes, at home and in India. Now it seemed to him (and to many others) that rampant liberalism and radicalism threatened the established order and the very empire itself. Nothing was safe. There was even talk of dismantling the East India Company altogether and giving the whole damned show to the natives!
In 1859, however, a worse threat had arisen, one that outweighed all others by far. The very foundations of society were at risk, and immediate action was called for. Thus, Sir Jasper had convened a small but distinguished group six months earlier to address the situation. These men occupied the very highest echelons of commerce, the military, and the Church. Knowing his audience, Sir Jasper had laid out everything in hypothetical terms only. He would be the only person of his class who could be held accountable should the thoroughly hypothetical plan fail. If it was successful, history would never know of its existence. He had never even used the word assassination. Today, they had suffered a setback, granted. But they had just been given another means of skinning the cat, and skin it they would.
8
The morning was bright, brisk, and blowy. The heavy rains in the night had cooled the air and washed London clean—cleaner, at least, than it had been the day before. As Inspector Field strode along the Strand, there was a spring to his step and a sense of renewed possibility in his heart.
Now this is more like it, a proper June morning.
Although he’d heard of them, Field didn’t know much about the political faction who called themselves communist. Now, thanks to his wife’s conjecture, his interest was piqued. Weren’t they the fellows who were blowing people up in Germany a few years back? Such folk would be antiroyal, doubtless.
The sight of his regular newsstand ahead of him gave him pause.
Best get this over with. After all, how bad can it be?
The first headline to catch his eye was relatively restrained. shots fired! queen unhurt, proclaimed The Times.
Fair enough, fair enough.
Field’s eyes moved to the larger, bolder banner of the Daily Telegraph: madman fires on royal carriage as constables look on!
The detective’s buoyancy was fading. With dread in his heart he saw that the Illustrated London News was offering a large sketch on its front page. It appeared to be a caricature of himself—as seen from the rear—running, with coattails flapping. our police in action!
Human nature being a mystery, it was the last of these publications that Field felt compelled to purchase. He fished in his pockets for a coin to give the newsboy, pulled out a sovereign, and stood suddenly motionless, staring at the coin. Mrs. Field must have transf
erred the contents of his yesterday’s trousers into the pair she’d laid out for him this morning. The coin was stained a dry rusty color.
“Inspector Field?” said the newsboy.
Hatchet-Face could have come by the coin most anyhow in the course of a day. It don’t necessarily mean a thing.
“Sir?” said the boy. “You want the paper or not?”
No. Stevie had been instructed: what to do and where to do it. And this coin here is what he got paid for it. I’d lay odds it is.
“Yoo-hoo, Mr. Bucket!” cried the newsboy, the twelve-year-old dripping with sarcasm. “Quite a nice likeness, don’t you fink? Bottom could be a bit bigger, but then these artists got licenses, don’t they?”
“Delightful child,” said Field absently, laying a sixpence on the newsstand’s wooden ledge. “Keep the change.” He turned to find Constables Llewellyn and Kilvert just behind him.
“Sir,” said Kilvert, “we’ve got someone at the station who might be able to assist us in our inquiries, sir.”
“Is it the missing butcher?”
Kilvert sighed and said, “Right again, Chief.”
“What do you know of these communist fellers, then?” said Field abruptly as he turned down Craven Street with his two colleagues in tow, a copy of the Illustrated News folded under his arm.
Kilvert looked sharply at Llewellyn. “Oh dear,” he intoned.
“Oh dear what?” said Field, glancing from one to the other. Llewellyn was blushing.
“Land of my fathers, sir,” said Kilvert, jerking his head in his partner’s direction. “Llewellyn here is one of them!”
And the ruin of Charles Field’s bright day was complete.
The butcher who had failed to bring the required pounds of flesh to No. 42 St. Albans the previous morning was sitting in a dingy room at the Metropolitan when Llewellyn and Kilvert ushered in Detective Field.
“His name’s Merrydew,” said Kilvert in a sepulchral tone. “Dennis.”
Field looked him over. Not yet thirty years old, Dennis Merrydew had the beaten look of a man who believes fortune to be forever against him and likely would wear the same expression even when sober. The inspector adopted his approach accordingly.